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China eh? sounds like a "particular" link network
If these Chinese links were "built" by the previous SEO company I'd ask them to remove them they'll probably have the necessary information to do that. Beyond that I would try to remove as many as possible and then go down the disavow route.
Hi Chris
As with all things SEO it depends.
If you're working for a huge brand and have the budget it might make sense to have different cc-TLD's and target those to each market.
It's a common belief that subfolders are better than subdomains and Google treat a subdomain as a separate site so in terms of maintaining domain authority you might want to take this option.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
It all will come down to budget, time and long term goals - do people in Germany prefer to see .de extensions do UK people trust .co.uk over .com?
The only advantage I have found for using sub-domains is you can host them on separate servers quite easily - but you can get similar benefits with a CDN.
It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios.
Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.
Hi Michael
Have you received a notification in Google WMT of a partial or site-wide manual penalty?
Have you seen a loss in rankings? I do offer link removal and disavow as a service so would be happy to take a look but you might find that you need to remove as many of the links as possible rather than disavow and submit a reconsideration request.
Cheers
Yes James you're referencing HTML that's incorrect
Never...
As James correctly pointed out the & (or ampersand) is not a good idea. However his explanation is a little incorrect.
You see URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, therefore the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.
When using unsafe ASCII characters you have to replace them with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.
Therefore an "&" is %26 and not & which is the standard HTML character set.
Personally I would look at a way to exclude the & and just have /5-star-hotel-near-beach/ for example
If you've had to noindex your products I would seriously be looking at ditching Cubecart.
Unfortunately the method method Oleg raised only works for Posts and not pages...
So you have a choice either write a PHP script and load it as a plugin or make some amendments to your .htaccess
Personally I noindex all my category and tags in WordPress as I don't think they offer the best way for people searching for information to enter my blog. That being said I always believe that i****f a page is of use to a searcher, then you should include it within the index.
I know you have said that you are getting 4% of your organic traffic via tag pages but what's the quality of these visitors, do they have a low bounce rate or better than average time on site?
It would be a good starting place for sites that are created in a similar way.
This basically says change anything ending index.html to end / using a 301 redirect
<code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.html?\ HTTP/</code>
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]</code>
This says redirect anything that starts http://www.domain...... to just http://domain......
<code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]```
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
```</code>
Okay then you want
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Options +FollowSymLinksDirectoryIndex index.html
<code>RewriteEngine on</code>
<code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html?\ HTTP/</code>
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]</code>
<code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]```
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
You haven't redirected www and non www so you need to add:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
What other errors are you getting? 3000 seems a lot!
Hi Christopher
Link Round ups and Resource pages are quite common on the web especially with bloggers.
I wrote a post about finding and approaching these types of sites...
Hey André
I'm a little unsure as to your question... but I think you are asking if it is bad to link to internal too many times with the same keywords?
If that's the case then yes make sure you diversify the anchor text you are using to link to your pages.
Hi Christopher (great name by the way)
When it comes to link building it really depends on the niche, the budget and strategy of the overall campaign as to what types of links I would advise anyone to go after.
1. Guest Blogging on Real Sites with Real Communities (not those glorified article directory blogs)
2. Resource Lists and Link Round ups if you have a high quality resource don't be afraid to ask other webmasters to link to you
3. Infographics - Data Visualisations really go down well in certain niches - in other areas they've been done to death
4. Broken Link Building and Helping Webmasters clean up technical site issues
If you are still struggling for inspiration then I recommend you check out this post
http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building
and I have a list of my favourite link building blogs here:
http://tripleseo.com/best-link-building-blogs-2013/
But as Mike King says "its about making friends or making the news"
How long does it take to get links indexed?
It depends upon on how often Google crawls the website and web pages concerned and whether or not they determine the content worthwhile adding to their index. You can perform a search in Google to see if the web pages containing your links have been indexed and check the last cache date.
**How long does it take Google Webmaster tools on average to detect links to my website? **
About 6 weeks on average, however Google does not include all your links in WMT
What about OSE?
The way Mozscape crawls and indexes the web means that deep pages are often not added to their OSE reports. If the links were only placed in the last 3-4 weeks it's unlikely Moz will havew found them all yet so I would hold on a couple more weeks.
So you're saying that you can get a link on a links page, which has very few outbound links, from a charity website?
I think you should take it, the website will most likely have a good authority and will be held in high regard over time as long as the site owners are responsible with their external linking strategies.
I would probably use a tool such as Link Prospector or Scrapebox and a handful of advanced search queries to return lots of results at once.
Ben gave a good one "things to do +city" but there are a lot more too:
City + "event sponsor"
City + "our sponsors"
City + sponsor list
City + sponsor contest
City + supporter "thank you"
Assuming each of these 15 links takes you about 5 minutes on average to get then you will spend about 75 minutes getting them.
Many of these links are from high traffic and high DA websites so they could actually rank in the SERP's for your business or brand name as well as send a small amount of referral traffic.
Ultimately I would go for relevance over these 15 links but for just over an hours work most of these links are easy to obtain and may even count towards your performance in the SERP's.
Hi Alan
There are better ways to get people to your landing pages than this tactic.
It's a terrible User Experience and as a visitor to your site if I clicked a link expecting an informative article only to be hijacked to sales page I'd bounce and probably never comeback.
Is that really worth it?
I'm nerdy so I download a CSV after every update & keep track of them in a big ol' spreadsheet 
If the graphics and charts will make the report look good and add value to the data then I'd add as many as I felt were neccessary.
Andrew
The Mozscape index is not Google's index.
Moz are an independent company that crawl the web and record links that they find as they go, this does not mean that Google has not found these links to your product pages.
Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to see if the links are showing?
Hi Niners
Are you referring to links in your OSE report?
Unfortunately the way in which Mozscape crawls the web means that not all web pages are added into the database.
The other reason is that your links are too new. It normally takes a good 4-6 weeks for SEOmoz to find the latest links to your website - although they are getting quicker at finding new links.
Have you access to any other link analysis packages such as MajesticSEO or ahrefs? It's better to have access to as many link reporting tools as possible to make sure all your links are being reported.
If you know the pages you have obtained links from are indexed by Google then that is a good indicator they have been discovered.
Larry,
I think the question you really should be asking yourself is:
Why should anyone bother to link to me?
Once you can answer that question you'll find it a lot easier to build or "earn" links to your website.
As for Link Building tools I recommend that you use Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to start to learn what types of content in your niche gets linked to the most, and then create a better resource than them or approach an old concept that was covered in a piece of content from a new angle.
I could literally write for hours on link building and link building techniques but if you can answer that first question you're in a better place than 75% of people who come to me for link building advice.
Hi Eric,
Are the links to your own website within the blog post followed?
Is your guest blog post indexed by Google?
Is the Blog that you posted your article on ranking for it's own brand terms (i.e. not penalised)?
If you can answer yes to these three questions then there is a very high chance that PageRank (or link juice if you prefer) will be passed from the guest post to your site, how much that moves the needle is subjective.
As Tom advises it is much better to try to aim your guest post efforts at sites that has an audience:
When I am qualifying sites for guest post opportunities then I will check the following:
1. Their articles receive a large number of social shares
2. They have a large RSS subscriber base or email list
3. The blog posts receive comments
There is a good post by James Agate on this topic over on the Moz blog
Ideally you want to be posting on places that your customers will hang out however they maybe direct competitors and it will be impossible to secure an opportunity.
For my clients I make sure the blog’s topic is relevant to the company’s (brand) readership/customers. I make sure the blog content is in line with the buyer personas outlined and their marketing journey, this does not necessarily mean that they are within the same niche but could be in a complimentary niche.
These guest posting opportunities will probably be a little tougher to secure but the extra effort will be worth it in terms of links, social shares and referral traffic.
I agree with Sara Thesis and Headway but I'd also recommend the Genesis Framework from Studiopress too.
As Matt stated the Yoast plugin is by far the best WordPress SEO plugin to use on your sites.
Hi Ben,
What CMS are you using for your e-commerce platform e.g. Magento, oscommerce?
If you can let me know what you are using I might be able to help you out a bit more.
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any duplication issues?
Nilesh,
Quite simply:
Page Authority is measured by several metrics but is related to the quality and numbers of links pointing to a particular web page.
Domain Authority is measured by several metrics but is related to the quality and numbers of links pointing to a a web domain.
In order for you to increase these metrics you need to acquire some more good quality links to your web pages, I would look at Jon Cooper's Link Building Strategies or the SEOmoz Link Building category for some good link building tactics and advice.
Thanks
Chris
Scott,
just because a link is not indexed by Google does not mean they don't know that your link exists. I would definitely remove these directory links from your link profile and if you are unsuccessful contacting the webmasters make sure you keep the emails and notes in your spreadsheet.
I have found its good to have this data in a Google Docs Sheet as it makes it easier to share with the Google Spam team once you do submit your reconsideration request
Cheers
Chris
I believe you are referring to getting backlinks indexed. The only reason you would need to go to all that effort is if you were building low quality links on deep pages or pages with thin content that Google would not value in their index (e.g. Forum profile links, blog comments) I'm sure you are doing more than enough to get your links indexed but they will become quickly deindexed if Google no longer values the page content. If you are going to all this effort to index a batch low quality links then why not put that same effort into building links on pages with more trust & better quality content that Google will want in their index?
Site wide Anchor Text Links do look like paid links so that could be an issue.
This article on Moz by Modesto Siotos may help you with identifying the "bad links".
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings
Jason - I think you might enjoy this article by Point Blank SEO on link building strategies there are lost of actionable tips.
nofollow is a value assigned to an <a>element so assigning it to</a>
<a>is incorrect.</a>
<a></a>
<a>You can read more here: </a>http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow
As Egol advised you need to understand your clients market.
Whats their average sale?
Whats the lifetime value of a customer? (repeat business)
Potential for Referral business? (Professional Services, Home maintenance)
What is their current marketing spend and Cost of customer Acquisition (COCA) look like?
Can you provide a lower COCA than their current marketing spend?
You don't want to be selling "SEO" you want to be selling your clients on the fact that you can reduce their Cost of Customer Acquistion and provide a higher ROI than their current advertising efforts.
Think of the potential clients near you e.g. Glazers, Home Security Installations, Fencing Suppliers, plumbers that have a high Average sale - a dozen extra sales per year for these businesses could have a serious effect on their bottom line.
Great work, that's a link in a fairly prominent place it should hopefully send some traffic as well as some link juice as it is a followed link.
With the recent link penalties for "over-optimised" links a good mix of domain, brand & partial match links are the way to go.
Diane
I ping numerous services at all once automatically, simply add this list to your Ping Services in your WordPress installation:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
If you add a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page then that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
It's your preference but I prefer just post name %postname% this means that if I ever chose to change a post to a page I can keep the URL structure in tact & not have to worry about redirecting pages.
I wouldn't worry too much if you are using your brand name or domain name then you are building natural links.
Personally, if you have different types of widgets then vary the anchor text / URL in the embed code for each.
Norberto,
It would be great if you could leave a link to your site so I could see your current navigation.
You could categorise the pages based on the team therefore all pages relating to a particular team would be interlinked with one another. As Alan recommended if running WordPress a plugin such as YARRP will help to link related pages together automatically based on content, tags and categories.
But linking your pages will help to flow link juice from old to new pages and help users navigate to related stories and fixtures.
Hi, you are running All in One SEO Pack 1.6.14.2 by Michael Torbert not Yoast
Hi Ian,
Open Site Explorer only crawls a percentage of the web and your DMOZ listing might be in a page that is too deep to be crawled and indexed by Linkscape. Also the OSE data is only updated every few weeks with the the next update due at the end of the month.
If you run a Google Search for site:dmoz.org "Nutrition Mission"
You can see the listing page has been indexed by Google and the last page cache is showing as 9 Apr 2012 10:18:13 GMT, so Google has visited the page recently and discovered your link.
That's right wapkilluk.co.uk is the root domain and www.waspkilluk.co.uk is your sub-domain
Hi Ankit
If you are trying to optimise your WordPress Blog then I recommend the Yoast Wordpress plugin.
It will certainly help you implement the correct Canonical URL for category/tag pages http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#canonical
Find the articles bringing in no traffic first some pf the articles might be bringing in some long tail traffic but gradually switch to the new articles when & where appropriate.
Ok so on further inspection I can see a lot of Anchor text heavy reciprocal links which have no doubt triggered the Webmaster tools message.
Reciprocal links themselves are not inherently bad but can often be implemented (particularly at scale) in ways that are not true to the spirit of trust and authority.
Reciprocal links are viewed negatively if there is an agreement or incentive in place to do so. This type of linking can get you in trouble if it makes up too large of a percentage of your overall backlinks.
In addition to these links you have internal links within poorly written content within the blog posts. Content written with the purpose of containing links is almost never high quality.
If you want quality links you need to take a personal approach to your emails. Whether that means offering some free advice e.g. Broken link building/Site errors, pitching a guest blog or just asking for a link. Good content + good relationships = good links
I'm sorry to hear of your bad experience. Without seeing your site I can't comment 100% on the quality of the content. By the sounds of it your former firm were trying to rank 1 page for 1 keyword I assume the pages are 350-600 word garbage posts? Personally I would consolidate the pages by trying to rank one page for several keywords. I would delete them, get a writer to write new content & 301 them to the new pages. If you want me to offer additional advice please feel free to send me a private message or email me via my website.